I'm often asked, 'what projects and companies do you see pushing the industry forward?' This past week I set myself to the challenge of finding works released approximately in the past year which could be considered to be dimensional interface art.

It ended up being somewhat difficult to find interface art with depth given that most designers have abandoned static UI art in favor of ephemeral animation, or eschewed using any art altogether. Nevertheless, I've found some exemplary designs from the community and I would like to share them with you.

Stripe Product Illustration

Stripe payments credit card illustration.

Another illustration of Stripe's global presence–this time animated.

Stripe has consistently put out trend-bucking illustrations to accompany their custom-tailored product lines. You can check out many more on their site product pages.

June UI Art

Detailed food category illustrations.

Interface buttons for the oven.

Louie Mantia and Alexa Grafera of Parakeet designed UI graphics for the recently announced June oven, including illustrations for everything from meat, fish, vegetables and snack foods, as well as UI buttons for cooking functionality.

Fresh to Depth

Bjango iStat Menus Icon Tutorial

Marc Edwards of Bjango published a breakdown of his icon design workflow. It's a must-read, with great tips even for experienced icon designers.

Earth Screensaver

Pranav Pramod's Earth screensaver.

Pranav Pramod released this illuminated Earth clock screensaver built in Quartz Composer. Even though screensavers are no longer necessary given LCD screens, this one is worth a look.

Taptanium's Parallax Soundscapes

Windy app.

Franz Bruckhoff of Taptanium designed and developed Windy and Sunny apps which combine stereoscopic soundscapes with the sole implementation of compelling parallax I have seen in recent years. The illustrations in the app are also top-notch.

Twitterrific Icons

Twitterrific for Mac, for Apple Watch and an interpretation by Balderoine.

Among other things, the Iconfactory's Twitterrific app was the first to use a bird in their icon (named Ollie). Designer Balderoine produced a beautiful replacement icon that evokes the same depth as its desktop counterpart.

Wildstar UI Art

An array of Durán's interface art.

Wildstar installation screen.

One of the only remaining fields of UI design in which expressive depth is not yet forbidden is video game design. UI Artist Miguel Angel Durán has in recent months been releasing samples of the vivid, otherworldly UI artwork he produced for the game Wildstar.

Encide User Interfaces

Apocalypse Meow

Spaceship animation by Guido Rosso.

Splitcell is taking advantage of 3D in their upcoming space fighter adventure game, Apocalypse Meow. As you might guess, there's a twist: the pilots are cats. Keep an eye out here for updates on the game. Be wary, it's quite addictive.

Painting with Pedja

Rusic's lotus flower.

Pedja Rusic is on a streak of illustrating highly detailed game artwork like this excellently painted lotus flower. You can find more illustrations from the set here.